Australia Day

Today is Australia Day, which prompts me to Blog up a few words about one of my favourite countries.

I don’t think anywhere suffers more from an unfounded image problem in Britain than Australia. It conjures up for so many people images of people wearing hats with corks dangling from them, drinking Castlemaine XXXX, Rolf Harris playing the Didgeridoo, low budget television soaps and culture being spelled “Kulcha”. Attributes like this are rarely accurate and in Australia’s case are just downright nonsense.

“Kulcha”? How many other countries are principally known around the world for having an Opera House, for goodness’ sake?

In any case, Australia’s culture actually goes back between 40,000 and 60,000 years (no-one is quite sure). Far from being savages in need of civilizing, Australia’s indigenous people seem to have been the world’s first mariners (by a considerable margin) and have kept and preserved their history in a way unrivalled elsewhere.

As is usually the case, the British, least of all Captain Cook, didn’t “discover” Australia at all. Man had known it to be there for centuries and the Chinese, the Portuguese and the Dutch all made cursory expeditions to the North, as did an English privateer called William Dampier, who left behind his name.

It was the British though that first properly surveyed the beautiful and (importantly) fertile East Coast (under Yorkshireman James Cook)…….although they waited some 17 years before actually founding a colony. (Yes, it was a penal colony. No, that doesn’t mean that all or even many Australians are descended from convicts. Yawn.) Indeed, they did so only a matter of days before a French expedition under Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, arrived. A few weeks later and Australia could have been French…….

But those early colonists did something that Australia has consistently been good at. They worked hard; and then they worked harder still. And they grew. By 1859 there were six separate colonies which quickly assumed what is called “Responsible Government". Perhaps following the federation and Dominion Status of the Canadian Colonies in 1867, talk began of Federation in Australia, too, encouraged by the Premier of New South Wales, the Coventry-born Sir Henry Parkes.

Parkes never lived to see Federation (then as now political negotiations were difficult and slow) but with the dawn of the new century on 1 January 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia became the second independent Dominion within the British Empire, sharing a monarch but assuming the running of its own affairs.

There is a tendency to describe India as being the Empire’s "Jewel in the Crown". But for ordinary Britons, I’ve always thought that Australia really had this position. It was somewhere many of them had family, has always been one of the more familiar outposts of empire and – even today – is a place that seems to “matter” to the British public more than the others. (You can see that whenever the press gets its knickers in a twist about Australia becoming a republic. They never bothered about Trinidad or Malta doing that, for example.)

Australia’s growing up and rise to full independence was rather like that of a child going through adolescence and into adulthood, gradually gaining more powers but still helping mother when she needed it. And goodness me, did she need it in the two World Wars, when Australia’s sacrifice in the service of Britain was tear-jerkingly loyal. (I once had to admonish someone for saying that they “didn’t know Australia was involved in the war”. Idiot.)

Today, despite constant attempts to look more towards South East Asia and those periodic rumblings about becoming a republic, Australia still feels (take a deep breath and wait for the flaming, Ian) more-or-less British to me. It certainly has more in common with say Coventry than Kuala Lumpur or Birmingham than Bangkok. I do sometimes say (and this is true of Canada, too) that it’s like the best bits of Britain and the USA rolled together and with the worst bits of both taken out.

But it isn’t really about “which country is Australia most like"; it’s most like Australia.

The things that make me admire it so much?

• The egalitarianism, above all. That you can rise to do anything irrespective of background or – as far as I can tell – money.

• The concept of service to the public (which leaves the US with its “have a nice day” culture standing).

• The bluntness of people in what they say (a very Jelf trait, that!).

• And finally the one legacy of once being British which will endure long after Australia becomes a republic, changes its flag and stops over-cooking vegetables: that of Fair Play.

I could go on (!): Melbourne, one of the most beautiful cities on this Earth,; Judith Durham; Tim Tams; Paul Kelley; the Blue Mountains; the Whitsundays; Lamingtons; the ABC; Taronga Zoo and the Indian Pacific Train. But this Blog is already ridiculously long and I only sat down to pen a couple of paragraphs for Australia Day.

It’s been a privilege to visit it and we are always looking forward to going back.

Happy Australia Day